The follow-up to her blockbuster novel “Fates and Furies,” Lauren Groff’s short-story collection “Florida” is a psychogeography that collapses the real and the imagined.

Photograph by Iannis G. / REA / Redux

It didn’t take long for “Fates and Furies,” Lauren Groff’s third novel, to earn the title of 2015’s “book of the year.” Spiky and mesmerizing, and a favorite of President Obama’s, the book examined a marriage, first from the husband’s perspective and then from the wife’s. The vantages were wildly different; divine voices (female and merciless) interjected in parentheses. “Fates and Furies” was hailed for its formal innovation and for its scathing dramatization of how profoundly we can get each other wrong.

“Florida,” Groff’s new collection of short stories, is headquartered in a “dense, damp tangle” of a state, “an Eden of dangerous things.” The husband-and-wife relationship is no longer a focus, though it factors in; rather than eavesdropping on fates or furies, we hear the narrator of Genesis—sort of. (“Babe, when Satan tempted Adam and Eve, there’s a pretty good reason he didn’t transform into a talking clam.”) Despite its departures from Groff’s earlier work, the collection still conjures that feeling of when the floor falls out from under you; as in “Fates and Furies,” familiar, everyday life dangles by a thin string. Representative characters include two young girls abandoned on a fishing island, a student living out of her car, a traveller caught in a storm, a woman hunkering down during a hurricane, a man stuck on a canoe. The natural world acquires an almost ceremonious menace: lush, toxic, grand.

As each story in “Florida” begins, select components from the same elemental scenario appear: a protagonist is imperilled by a weather event, an injury, or some other extremity; she has a spiritual forebear (the short-story writer Guy de Maupassant, the naturalist William Bartram); there are visitations from her personal past (ghostly husbands, hallucinated fathers); two children, one light and one dark, intercede (shades of Lotto and Mathilde, from “Fates”); a kind man is absent; an ogre is present; too much wine is consumed; the threat of chronic sickness hovers. The deadly and alluring flora and fauna of the bayou bide their time.

Taken together, the stories have the feel of autobiography, although, as in a Salvador Dali painting, their emotional disclosures are encrypted in phantasmagoria. “Fates and Furies” spelunked into characters’ psyches, while Groff’s short fiction projects psychology outward, externalizing dread, pleasure, and innocence in feral cats, jasmine, and cygnets. She practices not quite magical realism but a chaotic blurring or collapsing of the real and the imaginary, as if characters are simultaneously experiencing and dreaming everything that occurs. Fantasy becomes a sinkhole opening up in the Floridian ground. But Groff’s worlds are often less hallucinatory by virtue of what happens in them than by virtue of the language that composes them.

Groff has always been a sentence-level writer, and the sentences indigenous to “Florida” are gorgeously weird and limber. The lit windows of neighbors are “domestic aquariums.” An oak’s branches “are so heavy they grow toward the ground then touch and grow upward again; and thus, elbowing itself up,” the tree “brings to mind a woman at the kitchen table, knuckling her chin.” The author practices a kind of alchemical noticing that destabilizes reality and brings the outside world into alignment with characters’ inner lives. One mother “feels it nearing,” she writes, “the midnight of humanity. Their world is so full of beauty, the last terrible flash of beauty before the long darkness.” Hers is an artful hysteria; elsewhere, protagonists greet apocalypse with resignation or bravado. They are funnier than Lotto or Mathilde were, and a hair more human.

That Groff is pursuing a psychogeography of Florida, exploring both a state in the union and a state of mind, is made clear by her insistent figuring of the subconscious. The book is approximately thirty per cent underwater, and it is full of descents. (Like one of her fictional surrogates, an anxious mother of two, Groff “prods and prods the sinkhole in her mind.”) In “The Midnight Zone,” a woman vacationing with her two small sons in a remote cabin falls backward off a stool and concusses her head. (There are barely perceptible hints that she has cancer.) As she struggles to stay conscious, her boys desperately regale her with facts that they’ve learned from a TV nature program: “about the sunlight, the twilight, and the midnight zones, the three densities of water, where there is transparent light, then a murky darkish light, then no light at all.” This is a dread index—an image of sinking deeper and deeper into a nameless chill. But the water densities also map a Freudian scheme of manifest content (the surface-level interpretation of narrative) and latent content (the narrative’s submerged meaning). Groff deftly troubles the distinctions between these registers.

The perturbation grows intense as the story continues. “The Midnight Zone” opens with a panther sighting, a glimpse of muscle sliding through the trees around the cabin. (That same apparition graces the book’s cover.) The cat portends “something terrible,” “the darkest thing”—the fact of the mother’s mortality, hastened by cancer. Cognitive linguists speak of the unidirectionality of metaphor: we process the abstract in terms of the concrete. The fear of death is like a panther. But as the wounded woman seems to drift out of her body and into the animal’s, the terms of the analogy likewise float free from their domains. When the character’s husband returns to find her hurt, she looks into his face and sees “fear, and it was vast, it was elemental, like the wind itself, like the cold sun I would soon feel on the silk of my pelt.” The living cat has sublimed, becoming hypothetical, symbolic, with a fantastical, icy sun shining on its coat. Our lives are similarly delicate, Groff seems to argue. The worst can swiftly become tangible, just as we, in a matter of moments, can evaporate to spirit.

The shame their characters bathe in is atmosphere, and it is also portraiture: identity becomes a matter of what makes you squirm.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.